Weekend Box Office: Madea Outruns Jack Reacher
by EG
Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween had a surprisingly good opening weekend, significantly outperforming expectations and easily taking the top spot at the weekend box office. Tom Cruise's Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, on the other hand, performed exactly according to expectations, landing itself in the number-two spot.
Madea was expected, at best, to earn somewhere in the high-teen millions for the weekend, but it did much, much better than that, raking in $27.6 million and handily outdistancing the next-highest-grossing movie. That movie was Jack Reacher, which took in $23 million, a figure that was in line with expectations.
Both of these films placed far ahead of the number-three movie, Ouija 2: Origin of Evil. The horror sequel took in $14 million, again pretty much just as expected. Although a decent opening, that's nearly $6 million short of its predecessor's opening-weekend gross.
Fourth, fifth place and sixth places went to the top films of each of the previous three week, The Accountant, The Girl on the Train, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, respectively. Of those, only The Accountant cracked the $10-million mark.
The only one of this week's new wide releases not to do as well as or better than predicted was the comedy Keeping Up with the Joneses, which drew an anemic $5.6 million.